“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” E.B. White

Planning is not my favorite activity. It’s hard to concentrate for very long on what must be done with all the distractions there are out there. I’d much rather surf the web, shop online or play sudoko games. And then there’s TV…a whole other subject!

But planning really ends up being the activity that sets everything else in motion. Like spinning your wheels vs. actually going somewhere.

I got hacked yesterday. The site was entered, some malicious stuff was inserted, my admin password was all messed up and I ended up spending a few hours putting things back together.  And after it was all over, I went to the Joomla forums and ran across this statement: It’s not planning on foiling a hacker, it’s planning on what to do after you’ve been hacked…as if it’s inevitable that a server will be hacked.  Wow. Depressing.

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”
Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter (1798 - 1863)

I have never been a proponent of reproducing a photograph as a peice of art. Don’t get me wrong, I think it takes painstaking talent to create a painting that is indistinguishable from the original photo, but a stamp of originality, to me, is what makes art. So, you might ask, what has this got to do with web sites and graphic design? Well, my answer is of all the tens of millions of websites that are out there, a site you design should have some ’stamp’ of originality, be it an influence that appears in it’s implementation or an authenticity of some feature.

The challenge is keeping a sense of the clients’s business objectives  and finding the audience your client is appealing to. In my experience, it’s a rare client that understands their audience. Many times I’ve gotten the answer ” I’m appealing to everyone…staff, information seekers, new customers and returning customers”.  So our job as designers becomes helping the client visualize a functional design. For example, a good response might be: “Ok, let’s take new customers first. What kind of information is a new customer  looking for?” and ” What kind of information will your staff be looking for? “, etc. Usually, this interaction will narrow down the scope and the client begins to visualize a realistic picture of the sites function and appeal.

“Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.”-Kahlil Gibran

So begins my foray into the design process on this very rainy day in Michigan. If nature could inspire me today, it would be with misty, soft greens and dark reds and purples of the late summer and an anticipation of the fall colors, just like the beautiful fall photo on my site here. But color is just part of the design process for a web site. Layout or composition also is important. So I ask myself, does the creative process of designing a website need a certain amount of restraint? Could Picasso, Miro or Monet or Cezanne have created websites? I love a software package called Painter (Corel) and when I’m really stuck on a design, I go to Painter and am unleashed. Some of my best stuff has come from Painter.

Sometimes, it would be lots more fun to just take a can of paint and throw it on a canvas but since I can do that with Painter and my nice 21″ Graphic monitor, well, life is good.

Whenever a system goes through changes, there is always a period of time where things are fragile. Any website of a considerable size and complexity will have issues when major updates are done. Some sites have  history and there is sometimes a lot of customization, so changes will have an impact. The best advice I can give is to  take one issue at a time and fix it and the system becomes more and more stable. Nothing ‘randomly’ breaks. Mambo and Joomla are built to handle large sites, and have many interwoven dependencies and variables so you must expect a period of time for flushing out the problems.

Some frustration might come from making changes to the live site. Sometimes, when a site undergoes major changes, a test site is created. Then we make sure the test site is working before switching the domain name to point to the test site. This assumes that the site is thoroughly tested (and sometimes retested after corrections ) by the people that know the site best (the owners)…frontend and back, in the major browsers, etc.

So, for large sites and Joomla, make a test site, and then go at it and test, test, test. Don’t get frustrated unless no progress is being made. And measure your progress by itemizing the issues and checking them off as they are resolved.

It’s amazing to me the number of sites that must be out there. I like to think the sites I’ve done are unique and visually appealling but there are some awesome designs that are completely W3C compliant for usability and everything else which is very amazing. I find some extremely creative sites in Europe. I have a list I keep of ‘Cool Sites’…sites I’m especially impressed with. None of them have Flash..or few of them have Flash. Not that I don’t like Flash, I’m just thinking usability these days. One of my favorites, looks like she drew the site right on the monitor. She uses little arrows to point out relevant links and areas of her site. I think she’s in Romania. I’m not entirely sure it’s relevant in a business sense unless your business is kids, but it’s still very creative.

Anyway, I liked this template and hope to put my own Fall Season photo on top here soon..maybe something with a European flavor and definitely nature, natural, greens, oranges, reds and browns.

Oh, here’s the link to the site mentioned above: http://www.ribic.org